 and welcome back to History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. I'm Matt Brown. Today, we're going to be talking about Paul Fireabend and his book Against Method. We're going to be talking a little bit about what the scientific method is, or if there is such a thing. We're also going to talk about the Galileo case and the Copernican Revolution to some degree. Now, a little bit first about Paul Fireabend. Fireabend was born in 1924 in Vienna. Growing up, as a young man, his academic interests were in physics and astronomy. But he was also quite interested in theater and in music. And he reportedly had a great singing voice and spent a lot of his young life trying to figure out if his direction was going to be scientific or artistic. And in the end, of course, as we know, he ended up in Philosophy of Science, which perhaps is a middle ground. Now, while Fireabend was a college student, the Nazis rose to power in Germany. And after the German occupation of Austria, Fireabend was drafted into the Nazi work service. Fireabend subsequently ended up, during World War II, volunteering for officer school, not on his own account because he had any particular ideological or even nationalistic commitment to the German cause, but simply because he thought officer school would take so long that the war would be over by the time he had graduated. That's not what happened. And he did see fighting. He fought on the German side on the Eastern front. That is against Russia. And he was wounded in battle. Shot, a bullet lodged in his spine. He was temporarily paralyzed and permanently disabled by the wound. He ended up, as I said, pursuing graduate work in philosophy. So he worked in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Physics. Originally, he was very much influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. Ended up working with Popper in England at the London School of Economics for a while, and then spent much of his career at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as taking appointments in various European universities as well. So let's talk a little bit about this book, Against Method, which is what you read the first several chapters of for today. Against Method was originally conceived of as a dialogue volume. So Fireobin had written a long essay called Against Method, an outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge in 1970. And on the basis of that, a friend of his, another philosopher of science and follower of Karl Popper named Imre Lackatoche, wrote to him and said, you have such interesting, strange ideas. Let's write a debate volume. So Fireobin would write a section Against Method, against the notion of a scientific method, and Lackatoche would write a section for Method, in favor of the scientific method, and they would publish it as for and against scientific method. Now, unfortunately, in the midst of writing this, Lackatoche died, his part was not completed. And as a result, Fireobin ended up publishing against Method as a solo volume. And it became his most defining work. The original version came out in 1975. He published a second edition in 1987. And the final third edition he published in 1993. And then a few years ago, they reprinted the book in a fourth edition with an introduction by Ian Hacking. So the book, it has this kind of, it takes a kind of extreme side, in part because it was supposed to be paired with an alternative view. It is dialogical in nature. Some of you have pointed out there's this long confusing footnotes in the book, but I think they're in part an attempt to kind of fill in the dialogue a little bit. Also, they're a result of the multiple stages of revision and Fireobin's own somewhat eccentric writing style, which involves a kind of non-linear thinking as well as very many references to things that the audience might not have been familiar with. So it required a little bit of explanation. So that's sort of the origin of the book. In the book, he takes the position that there is no common structure to the various things that we call science or the sciences. There is no one single scientific method at work. And the writing style or the argument style of the book has two parts. On the one hand, it is historical. So Fireobin integrates history and into the philosophy of science to make this argument that there is no single scientific method. And it also has an abstract philosophical element to it. So he argues normatively speaking against the idea of any binding scientific method. The famous phrase from the book, anything goes, is a kind of tongue and cheek expression of this view where he says, look, if you want a single principle that can govern all of science, there's only one principle that could possibly satisfy you and be true to science and not restrict science from doing what it needs to do. And that's the principle, anything goes, right? Not that he's literally recommending anything goes, rather he's recommending a kind of open-ended methodological pluralism about science. Now, the, let me say a little bit more about the historical side of the method here or the historical side of the argument here. Fireobin doesn't just think you can conclude from the basis of some historical thing that scientists have done, that that's a good way to do science. No, that argument doesn't work for him. Instead, what he does is he takes cases that anyone he thinks would agree, any sort of defender of the scientific method would agree, are cases of exemplary science and action. And he says, look, these violate the method that you wanna defend, right? And that's why Fireobin thinks the history actually has some bite on a philosophical account. It says, look, if you had your way methodologically speaking, you would rule out these important landmark achievements in science. And the one he talks about the most in the book is the case of Galileo. In order to make this case, he makes kind of two, in this first part, there are two big lines of argument he runs. So nothing could seem less controversial in terms of the scientific method than the idea that, look, new scientific theories should be consistent with the past results, right? With well-established results. He takes this in two directions. He says, on the one hand, it might mean that new theory needs to be, in some broad sense, logically consistent with prior well-confirmed scientific theories. So scientific theories with lots of evidence behind them. And number two, that new theories need to be consistent with well-established facts, with well-established observational or experimental results, right? He says, he asks, what would the opposite of those, what would a method that violated those principles look like? And he calls that method counter-induction or counter-inductive method. So a counter-inductive method would either posit new ideas that are logically inconsistent with well-established theories, or it would posit theories that are inconsistent with established scientific results, right? And his argument is that this counter-inductive method is exemplified by the things that Galileo does in his work. Now, you might think, well, you know, how dare Fireobin try to impugn the reputation of Galileo? Galileo is a key figure in the scientific revolution, but that's not Fireobin's point at all. Fireobin doesn't mean to say that Galileo's work is suspect or problematic. Rather, he's attempting to show that by the lights of a theory of scientific method, by the kind of what he calls rationalist account of how science works, Galileo would be so impugned, Galileo would be so impugned by such a method. He agrees with you that Galileo is in fact a good scientist, and therefore he thinks this provides us an argument that you too ought to accept, any defender of scientific method ought to accept, that these methodological rules or restrictions are suspect, right? And so that's the purpose of that kind of historical argument. Now, you might think that's pretty problematic, right? Because Fireobin is saying, you know, in order to make progress, like we see in the Galileo case, science needs to proceed without these methodological restrictions. But what kind of concept of progress are you gonna assume if you don't think that science has to be consistent with what's come before, right? This is like the Kuhn problem, where you have radical change from one paradigm to the next. But instead of happening, you know, in these rare occasions of scientific revolutions, it's happening all the time, constantly in science. Well, Fireobin does have a couple of things to say about this. On the one hand, he tells us, look, I'm not gonna give you a theory of progress. Use whatever theory of progress you're already committed to. The point I'm making is that according to your theory of progress, probably cases like Galileo are cases of making forward motion. That is, they're cases of progress. On your own account, to make that progress, we had to proceed in that case counter-inductively, right? So that's one thing he says. And I think we can see this as a kind of imminent or internal critique, right? He's not so much propounding his own new philosophical method or philosophical system. He's going within the assumptions of the views he's criticizing and using the commitments there. On the other hand, he does, in a few places, say some things that maybe indicate what his own view would be. And it seems there, when he's thinking about scientific progress, he's not so much thinking about an abstract notion of progress of knowledge, the growth of our knowledge. He's really thinking about scientific progress being linked to human progress, right? To the growth of our human capacities. He's not so much thinking about progress as narrowly defined scientific progress. He's thinking about progress as human progress, as improvement in human capabilities, in human knowledge, consciousness, and the betterment of society, perhaps. So those are some of the key ideas I want you to take away from the book Against Method and the first seven chapters or so. And of course, we'll continue the discussion as he develops the example of Galileo further and starts to unpack some further consequences of his argument and address some further considerations next week. If you have any questions about what I've said today, please or comments or concerns, please raise them in our discussion forum or on Discord or leave a comment here on the video. I look forward to continuing the conversation with you and I will see you next week.